


not practical but breakable

by lulabo



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: Darcy POV, Darcy drunkenness, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-07
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-23 23:57:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/627959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulabo/pseuds/lulabo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will watches Lizzie's videos. One-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not practical but breakable

**Author's Note:**

> thanks as always a million to Allison for reading and pointing me in the direction of a title.

Gigi has this habit when she speaks of making pronouncements. Whenever Gigi is a state of excitement or melancholy or embarrassment or delight, Will has to remind himself to take whatever she’s saying, divide it in half and then in half again and he might have some idea of what she actually means. Their mother, before she died, had told Will that Gigi would become the kind of person to feel everything too keenly—she would live and love to the tips of her fingers, and it would give her tremendous joy and cause her tremendous grief. She’d brushed his hair off his forehead and told him to remember this about his sister. Your temperaments are so different, she’d said, that you’ll always wonder how much to take her seriously, but you will need to take her seriously, Will. And she had laughed, a little, and a little sadly, shaking her head as she said, but you take everything seriously, don’t you? 

Will, himself, is not the kind of person given to hyperbole. He hasn’t seen that movie a million times. He does not just _love_ brunch. And, despite the physical pain of his heart just beating, despite the tightness in his chest and the burning in his eyes, he knows that he’s not, in fact, _dying for real._ (Gigi regularly says that she is _dying for real._ When a TV show is over and she can’t wait to see the next installment, Will has seen her curl around a pillow and howl that she is dying for real. When she has a really good bite of ice cream, she is dying for real. When he came to her in a hotel room to find her in an old tee shirt that didn’t belong to her with mascara raccooned beneath her eyes and crying so hard she could not draw breath, she was _no for real, dying for real._ It was one of the few times he didn’t think to take it with a grain of salt.) Lizzie Bennet telling him that she was, indeed, rejecting him may not be the worst thing that’s ever happened to him, but it’s hard for him not to hear Gigi in his head, _omigod this is like the worst thing that has happened to anyone ever I can’t even deal with it right now._

“Why don’t you watch my _videos?”_

He gets lost in the parking garage trying to get back to his car after leaving Lizzie at Collins & Collins. It’s not Gigi-level overstatement to say that this never happens to him, that he keeps track of these kinds of things and has never wandered a parking lot looking for his own vehicle. And he knows it’s not truly a Herculean task to wait until he gets home to google “Lizzie Bennet”, but the Gigi voice in his head still says _I literally can’t wait this is like the longest drive home ever._ It may be hyperbole, but for the first time he might understand what she means when she says _I felt like I was never, ever going to get home and I was going to spend an eternity in traffic waiting to get back and it was the worst thing ever._

But he waits. And he gets to his place in San Francisco in less than half an hour. And he’s relieved _(super, super relieved)_ to have the place to himself, not to have to worry as he did in LA that Caroline might be lying in wait for him on some pretense or other, that Bing would want to talk and talk and _talk._ He goes into his study, closes the door, and sits at his desk. He boots up his computer, and he takes long, measured breaths as he waits through its rumbling and blinking until he’s able to click the internet icon on his desktop and type her name into the search bar. It takes no time at all for the results to appear—her Twitter feed, her website, her YouTube profile. And there is Ep. 1, “My Name is Lizzie Bennet,” right on the front page. He understands anatomy and physiology, he knows that his heart is not truly knocking around in his chest. He does not really feel like he’s going to have a heart attack. But he does, a little, feel like he’s going to have a heart attack. 

“My name is Lizzie Bennet, and this is my life.”

He remembers once after what Gigi calls the Terrible Horrible, when he found her in tears and tried to talk to her about it, and she told him that while he is an excellent brother and she loves him very much, sometimes it’s hard to have feelings out loud around him because he thinks having feelings out loud is dumb. I’m sorry, Will, she’d said. But you totally think feelings are dumb. Even when you have them, you’re like, this is dumb, I hate feelings.

Seeing Lizzie’s face, the way it makes his whole torso feel like it might implode, he thinks, _I hate feelings. Feelings are dumb._ He has to start the video over, twice, because he’s distracted from what she’s saying by her face. Her lively, arresting face. He had called her decent enough. And he thinks of Gigi, frustrated trying to open a jar of Nutella, yelling, _omigod I hate **everything.**_

Lizzie’s portrayal of her mother, while less nuanced, perhaps, than reality, confirms more than anything what he had already understood and observed about Mrs. Bennet—that when it comes to her daughters, she has an anachronistic, intense need to see them married if only to get them out of the house and their financial burdens off their parents. He concedes, then, that telling Lizzie this was probably not the best way to endear himself to her, a thought that makes him pause, literally, with Lizzie’s animated face frozen on his computer screen in an expression of sarcastic disbelief, and figuratively, as he wonders what he had expected when he entered her office at Collins & Collins. Certainly not to be so rudely rebuffed—certainly not to be so reviled. He fixes his eyes on the door of his office, concentrating not on Lizzie’s face but on his own intentions. He hadn’t thought, had he, that she would fall into his arms? Had he thought she would consider, even for a moment, that she might regard him even a little? Had he thought at all about anything other than what he felt, what he could no longer keep to himself? He has to shake his head. If anything, he’d thought only of what it would cost him if Lizzie had said she felt the same. He never wondered if she didn’t. He’d hardly wondered what she felt at all.

What she feels, however, seems to be the entire point of her video diaries. She thinks rich, single men under a certain age are either reprobates or self-involved loners. And this before she even met him. So he watches the next video, and the next, and nearly laughs when he sees the fourth is titled “Bing Lee and His 500 Teenage Prostitutes,” because eventually that’s a google search that will bite Bing in the ass. His heart does not literally stop when she says his name in this video for the first time—hearts just don’t stop, no matter how often Gigi might claim her own jumped out of her body or that she threw it up in response to something so moving it killed her dead. (Or ded, he’s pretty sure it’s ded.) But she says his name and she laughs, because according to Lizzie Bennet, the name William Darcy is an awful name. For a dubstep DJ. He could almost find it funny, especially because he loves—and it’s not an exaggeration, he really does love it—the way Lizzie says her own name, like she’s in a hurry to get it out of her mouth. _Mynameislizziebennet._ It’s sort of wonderful, the way she says this.

Less wonderful is the video called “Snobby Mr. Douchey.” She told him to watch the videos, he thinks. Lizzie doesn’t self-edit in these videos (she doesn’t edit at all, but Charlotte’s use of jumps and cuts would be entertaining if he weren’t viewing all this through a veil of pain and tortuous curiosity, a thought he can only ascribe to his current state of mental disarray). According to Lizzie, making his acquaintance was less actual pleasure and more of a grotesque, nauseating, run-the-other-way-as-if-your-life-depended-on-it pleasure. So, he thinks, not a pleasure at all. Lizzie is a subscriber to Gigi’s descriptive philosophies, it would seem. He has to cast back in his memory as she continues to call him obnoxious, boring, stiff, unbelievably rude, and stuck up. What had he been like at the Gibson wedding? He shelves the thought to finish the video, though his better judgment tells him to stop when she announces, “I just can’t properly express what an infuriating douchebag this guy is.” 

For once he doesn’t defer to his better judgment, even when she wonders aloud if spends his days lounging around in $5,000 boxers, watching British miniseries with people he pays to be his friends, as Lizzie believes no one would want his company otherwise, which is an absurd imagining from top to bottom. Nor does he stop when the video cuts to Lizzie in a newsboy cap and red bowtie beside Lydia’s Bing Lee. And before she even speaks, before he consciously realizes that she’s impersonating him, he has the ridiculous thought that he would never wear a clip-on tie.

He leans closer to the screen, watching and trying to remember all at once. According to Lizzie, he told Bing that dancing is preposterous. Her voice—her voice as his voice—is very nearly adorable. But she’s dramatizing him in a video on the internet, and she’s quoting him at a wedding where he knew no one and felt almost comically out of place, especially beside Bing, who fits in everywhere and with everyone. Even when they were children he knew that Bing had pleasing manners. That Bing’s kindness and affability would be a sort of force field against rejection. Maybe if he’d been silent at the wedding, he’d be faring better in these videos now. Maybe if he’d only pretended to be more like Bing. But he has never been able to pretend, and it’s led him here, to Lizzie making pronouncements on his behalf on the internet.

“I hate dancing. It’s a waste of time. Like saying nice things to people.” 

“None of these girls stand up to my ridiculous standards.” 

“You found the only pretty girl at this wedding. Even if she smiles too much. I dislike smiling. It contorts the face.” 

A somewhat true to life portrayal, she says. Hedging only a little. And how much hyperbole is this? The look on her face—even if her script is exaggeration and he’d been as polite as Bing Lee on his best and most brilliantly personable day, the look on her face scolds him and tells him that whatever he’d said in reality, the video is what she feels to be true. That however hyperbolic it might be to say, he really is the last man in the world she would ever fall in love with.

He definitely needs a break. He rises from the desk and moves to the couch, where he assumes his thinking posture: he swings his legs over the top of the sofa and lies on his back, his head hanging towards the floor. He folds his hands over his stomach and stares at the ceiling, flexing and stretching his feet. He reaches into his pocket for his phone.

“Will! What’s doing, brother?”

He clears his throat. “Gig, if someone—” Covering his eyes with one hand, he kicks his feet at the ceiling, frustrated. “Say you were—say you had—if there was—”

“Will, if you don’t finish a sentence, I really can’t give you advice.” She squeals. “This is a _girl thing,_ Will Darcy. Spill. Everything. I want to know everything. Well, not _everything,_ obviously, because gross, but all the news that’s fit to print.”

He has to smile. “Never mind, Gig. I don’t really know what I want to hear anyway.”

“Good, because you know I’m not going to tell you what you want to hear, I’ll tell you the truth.” He can hear the swish of a door and a sudden uptick in background noise. She’s entered a cafe or the mall, and it’s not that he’ll lose her attention so much as he decides he just wants her to do whatever it is she’d planned to—have fun, relax, have a latte. Have an afternoon being young. 

“It’s nothing,” he says. “Sometimes I just like to hear your voice.”

Were such things possible, he’s sure he could hear her roll her eyes. “You know, Will, even the Tin Man had a heart.”

He struggles to an upright position. “Excuse me?”

“The Tin Man, you know, _The Wizard of Oz?_ He thought he didn’t have a heart, but it was in him all along even if he didn’t know it.”

“Are you saying I’m the Tin Man, Gig?” he says, and he can’t help but be a little bit teasing.

“I’m saying you’re a dork is what I’m saying,” she retorts. “Call me back if you really want to talk about something, otherwise I’ve got like nine hundred pair of boots to try on.”

“Love you, Gig.”

“Love you, dork.”

He returns to the desk with a bottle of Belvedere, a bucket of ice, and a tumbler. He pours several fingers over ice, takes a slug, and replenishes it before he scans over the contents of Lizzie’s playlist. “The Most Awkward Dance Ever.” He takes another gulp of vodka, closes his eyes, and hits play.

His memory of the Gibson wedding is not that different in its essentials. He tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible; he flattened himself along the back wall as often as he could in an attempt perhaps to disappear or be entirely unseen. He never knows what to do with his hands when there are so many strange people about, and he often ends up either hugging his own elbows or jamming his hands so deeply into his pockets that he’s punctured seams in the past. He keeps to corners, because people who don’t know you rarely seek you out in corners. He speaks when spoken to. He avoids any potential awkwardness, which at weddings usually involves things like catching garters and dancing. But Bing had pulled him over to the horde of bachelors hoping to dance with any girl desperate enough to throw herself in the trajectory of a flying bouquet. The garter literally slapped him in the face, much the way the bouquet had been forced on Lizzie. And it’s obligatory, what Gigi calls the predatory singles dance. 

So he danced with Lizzie, who was so disgusted and embarrassed by the whole situation that she couldn’t hide it. It’s evident not just from Lizzie’s diaries but his interactions with her in the past that that she’s incapable of feeling something and not having it show up on her face. And he found her not so much charming as intimidating. His throat felt thick and his hands felt numb and he felt incapable of saying anything interesting or engaging or remotely appropriate for the situation. If he were more like Bing, he’d have put her at ease. He’d have made light of the whole concept of a forced dance. He’d have made her feel like this was the beginning of something promising. He’d have flirted and it would have been memorable and she’d have gone home thinking maybe that her own wedding couldn’t be that far off. But he doesn’t have the same qualities that Bing has to make something awkward and uncomfortable and unbearable into something tremendously exciting. So he’d held her stiffly in his arms, not wanting to get too close and offend her. He’d thanked her for the dance because it was the polite thing to do. 

But maybe he’d just seemed like a dick. That’s what he’s getting from “The Most Awkward Dance Ever.” That he’d seemed like a dick. Or, in her words, a stupid pompous prick. It’s an overstatement, but he does think that sarcasm has never cut so deep as Lizzie’s when she says, “What a charmer!” 

He doesn’t remember the conversation with Bing she relates. If he’d said she was decent enough, he could hope that he was doing it to get Being off his back, to make Bing stop making him make the best of it. But it’s just as likely that his discomfort was making him an asshole and he really didn’t want to dance with Lizzie. Because while he can think of plenty of things that are worse than dancing with and among strangers at a wedding of strangers, there are few things he’d rather do, and the fact that Lizzie could not have telegraphed more loudly that she also had very little interest in dancing, especially with him, he can see how that train of thought developed. And how it would have sounded to any woman, let alone Lizzie.

“Well, Mr. Darcy, I hope it’s not too lonely on the pedestal you’ve put yourself on. It’s safe to say I like you even less than you like me. “

He can’t keep track of all the barbs as they’re coming, or he’ll drink the entire bottle of Belvedere before the evening’s over. (Though she does call him a douche again, and even Jane can barely muster more for him than “prickly” and “tall,” which apparently means he has personality problems. A claim he’s sure even Bing and Gigi, who he knows love him, would not hesitate to back in certain respects.)

The various Bing-related shenanigans interest him not much, and there are several episodes devoted to Lizzie’s mother’s intentions in that quarter. He would say that Lizzie handles it with good humor but it more goes to prove his point that Lizzie’s family have an unhealthy fixation with Bing, his home, and his finances. He sips his vodka, sinks into his chair, and keeps clicking “next.” Until “next” is Ep. 15, when apparently Lizzie Bennet Is In Denial.

As soon as the newsboy cap and red bowtie appear, Will sighs and cracks his neck, girding himself up for what is surely more mocking of his person. Jane’s posture, the way she holds her chin, is bemusing, and she stops, delighted with herself, to ask, “Is that good? Did I do it right?” It’s impossible to be charmed when he’s sure he’s about to be the butt of the joke, but the pain in his chest sharpens when he remembers the vehemence with which Lizzie accused him of destroying her sister, the kindest soul in the planet. Will has never considered himself someone to linger on decisions long enough to regret them, but it does strike him that Jane Bennet has a kind face. 

He remembers the conversation with Caroline that Charlotte claims to have overheard, if only because Caroline hasn’t been that overtly peeved at him since the time he and Bing got so drunk after graduation that they threw up in her favorite purse. That night at Carter’s she had mentioned that she’d been told, at the Gibson wedding, that the Bennet sisters were the most popular, admired girls in their high school growing up, and that they were all considered to be beautiful and smart and charming. Caroline had sipped her drink and shrugged one shoulder and said that she didn’t really see it. And because Caroline presses his buttons in very specific ways, usually by invading his personal space and assuming all her opinions are also his, he’d gestured to the bartender and said, without looking at her, that he thought Lizzie Bennet had the most interesting countenance he’d ever seen. Not quite the stiff poetry of Charlotte’s “I’ve been thinking about the pleasure a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow,” but perhaps kinder than what he’d said. Once he’d said it, he’d felt compelled to spare a glance for Lizzie. He swallows thickly. She had been laughing while he spoke to Caroline, and it had loosened something in his gut he didn’t understand. But he hadn’t fake texted—he had texted Gigi _for real._

When Lizzie starts to talk about swimmers, Will gets a creeping sensation at the back of his neck and the mere mention of George Wickham—George fuckall fucking Wickham—has him reaching for the vodka bottle once again. It’s there he wants to stop, just stop putting himself through what feels like an extended experiment in self-humiliation, and forget he never knew anyone named Bennet. But her accusations still ring in his ears and it’s all out there on the internet for anyone to consume, and it’s better that he know what’s been said about him. What he may have said and done and forgotten. If the recent uptick in twitter followers and stranger interactions is any indication, Lizzie’s diaries could be his first impression on a lot of people, newsboy cap and all. But he lets his mind wander while Lizzie’s at Vidcon, and he has to admit it’s not just in self interest he keeps pressing forward. It’s that Lizzie’s face is utterly compelling. She has a freckle on her collarbone and a smile so infectious it makes his throat hurt—or, he thinks, that’s just vodka going down.

Living with the Bennet sisters and the Lee siblings under one roof was difficult for several reasons. The first and most acute was that it made him miss his sister. Though the time they’ve spent sharing a home in their life is relatively short, given their age difference, seeing the way that Jane and Lizzie could simply share a look and burst into laughter or Caroline and Bing’s conversational shorthand made him feel like the odd man out. And the second, but more troubling, was the dawning realization he was entering dangerous territory with Lizzie Bennet.

A day or two after Lizzie and Jane’s arrival at Netherfield, Caroline’s usual weirdness with him got weirder. The entire time he has known and been friends with Bing Lee, he has been aware of Caroline’s obvious intentions if not to win him over then to entrap him into a compromising situation. Lizzie’s presence ratcheted Caroline’s usual attention to him up three levels, but it took Will more time than it should have to cop to what she was attempting. Will had been at work in Bing’s study and taken a break to find Caroline and Lizzie chatting in the kitchen about a sorority sister of Caroline’s that had apparently just called. Caroline had said that the girl used to be pretty together but since college had sort of let herself go.

“Let herself go?” Lizzie had said. The phrase clearly irked her. “What do you mean?”

Caroline had waved her hand. “I don’t mean let herself go like that, obviously, Lizzie, I just mean she used to be really together and she’s just... lost her edge. Wouldn’t you say, Darcy?”

“I can’t speak to whether or not she’s lost her edge but I don’t recall her being particularly _accomplished_ in the first place,” he’d said. 

Lizzie had rolled her eyes, and Caroline had jumped at the comment. “Well, if Heather wasn’t _accomplished_ back then—”

“I’m sure she was perfectly competent, Caroline.”

Lizzie had laughed. “Wow. That is generous of you, Darcy.”

He’d been about to leave the room when Caroline had lobbed the question again at his back. “So what would make a woman more than competent? What would make her truly accomplished?”

And because it seemed like the only way to get her to leave him alone and return to work, he’d answered. It had been the wrong thing to do, and Lizzie’s expression of contemptuous amazement only scratched the surface of what he’s watching on the video diaries now. “I for one would prefer not to build up my douchebag threshold,” she says. So he pours himself another few fingers of vodka, because there have to be at least six more videos of her stay at Netherfield, given how long she and Jane had managed to stay. He’s going to end the evening pretty drunk, but he’s okay with that, because if it dulls the amount of searing shame and humiliation he’s experiencing, he’d hook the bottle directly to a vein and wait for oblivion to come.

“Jane says I’m imagining things, but I swear, every time I’m in a room with that man, he stares at me constantly. It’s like I’m a traffic accident and he just can’t look away.”

And this is when he understands everything Gigi has ever said, because he really does want just to sink through the floor into the depths of the earth and just never breathe air again. He wants to go back in time and tell his parents that his entire existence is a mistake and that they should just abstain and make the world a better place. He’d tell the Lees to keep their legs together, too, because he’s starting to think that Caroline is an evil spirit sent to wreak havoc specifically in his life. The way she lures Lizzie into telling stories about him in which he makes an ass of himself—it’s clear to him now that he doesn’t need a lot of help making an ass out of himself, but Caroline’s prompting has led Lizzie not only to calling him a douche so many times it starts to sound like an endearment but also to her proclaiming vehemently, “I can safely say I’ve never hated anyone as much as I hate Darcy.” 

He picks up his glass and the vodka bottle and heads for the terrace. He drops to the ground, sits with his back against the building, and looks up. It was difficult to figure out exactly what was happening when Lizzie was living in such proximity to him. She challenged him—instigated arguments, Jane says—contradicted him at every turn but really just challenged him to think about what he said both before and after he said it. She was provoking. Watching her with Jane and Bing and sometimes Caroline, he could see that she has a capacity for joy and laughter, and it just died whenever her gaze wandered too far in his direction. 

Will runs his hand over his face, takes another drink of vodka. He’d gone from finding her intriguing at the start of her stay at Netherfield, strangely intriguing and maybe exasperating, to simply captivating. He found himself seeking her company, trying to engage her with things he’d come to know she enjoys. Her nearness filled him with a heaviness, a ponderous weight in his chest, and an endless curiosity to know her better. He scans the skies above his apartment building, now, trying not think of her vibrant face, her grey eyes. The whiteness of her skin. Her person in the videos is distracting—she never seems to wear anything that covers her shoulders. 

He starts watching the videos on his phone out on the terrace. His stomach sinks further when it seems that Jane is on his side, that Jane is trying to talk him up and prove to Lizzie that Will genuinely likes her. He’s enough in his cups now that when Lizzie says he likes nothing except himself and wearing scarves in the summer, he laughs aloud. Jane’s impersonation of him asking Lizzie to dance is not just kind but rather endearing, though it’s clear that Lizzie finds even faux-Darcy to be infuriating and obnoxious. 

“Hate you? I could never hate you.” And even charming Jane-Darcy just makes Lizzie gag.

But there isn’t enough vodka in the bottle—possibly there is not enough vodka in the world—to help him get through watching Lizzie Bennet giggle and swoon and flirt about George Wickham. Because George—fucking fuckall George—has not changed one iota since the last time Will saw him. His stupid, punchable face—Will is dimly glad he’s not watching on his desktop anymore because the temptation to put his fist through the screen would be overwhelming. He’s at the point now where he’s not sure he’d know the difference between beating up his computer and beating up George Fucking Fuckall Wickham. He thinks he should have knocked him flat that night they ran into each other at Carter’s. That’s actually a super satisfying thought. That would have been the best thing he could have done. He could have punched out George Wickham, and it would mean that he wouldn’t be sitting here right now watching George almost nose-to-nose with Lizzie, which is raising the bile in Will’s throat, and maybe Lizzie would have been outraged at the time but he’d have been able to tell his side of the story first, because clearly George is so full of bullshit it’s practically coming out the top of his head, like a shit-filled Chia Pet.

“I don’t want to sully any names.”

And this is when he just starts talking to the screen. “Go sully your own fucking name, you fucking knob,” he says. And while Lizzie calls Wickham a disturbingly good person and they start hypothetically telling the one-sided tale of Darvid and Batman, poor, misunderstood fucking fuckall Batman who just wanted to go to a really badass cave, Will throws up copiously into the potted plant in the corner of the terrace. It’s not just that Lizzie and Wickham seem to be about three centimeters from kissing, but that Wickham can even—he knows this fucking kid, and he knows that Wickham is getting off on this somehow, that this story he’s telling about Batman and the cave denied to him by the evil Darvid is somehow seriously funny to him. And Will’s not sure he’s ever going to stop being sick about it.

He should have tried to tell Lizzie about it, during what he’s surprised she didn’t call the Second Most Awkward Dance Ever. He should have at least attempted to explain something about Wickham. Because Lizzie thinks Will’s a life ruiner. Will Darcy ruins lives. He certainly ruins potted plants, he thinks dully. The wasted opportunity of that dance to tell her that whatever she thinks of George Wickham, Will might never be able to make her understand what kind of black heart is in the middle of that strikingly handsome package.

Talking about fuckall fucking Wickham was really the farthest thing from Will’s mind when he asked Lizzie to dance at that party. He smiles now, chagrined, remembering the twenty minutes of internal debate—do it, don’t do it, do it, don’t do it, shut up and just do it if you want to do it—as he stood at the back of the room, watching Lizzie make the best out of a mixed bag of expectations. Watching her negotiate between wanting just to have fun, but knowing her mother was in the next room; wanting to socialize but worrying about Jane; wanting not to have her eye on Lydia but seeing Lydia everywhere at every moment. And seeing all that, the baggage of her family trailing her around the room all evening, all he’d wanted was to be close to her, even if for just the length of a song. The idea was so tantalizing, he wasn’t even sure he’d made up his mind when he found himself crossing the room, interrupting her conversation with one of the Gibsons, and asking her (he remembers, with a hot flush of embarrassment) with all the finesse of a total clod, if she would dance. He’d seen panic briefly flash in her eyes before her better manners overtook her and she said yes, sounding surprised even at herself. And for a good half a minute, he’d been able to put his arms around her (however stiffly, however awkwardly) and take her in. She was blinding.

And then there was fucking fuckall George Wickham to talk about. He’d spent the rest of the night watching the other Bennets, wanting Lizzie out of his head. Her infatuation with that fatuous blowhard shitbird sent points of nervous energy across his skin and suddenly thinking about Lizzie was almost as difficult as not thinking about Lizzie, so he averted his attention. Drew his own conclusions. Made his mental lists to share with Caroline that evening after the party, when they decided to approach Bing together about the Bennet family’s treacherous finances and Jane’s universal niceness. Of course it seems like she likes you, Bing, she likes everyone. She’s just that kind.

Will forces himself to sit through the next series of videos without a few bolstering shots of Belvedere, and Jane’s pain cuts him to the marrow. It’s been clear to him all night that the case with Jane is not necessarily that still waters run deep as much as still waters reflect the light. Jane’s kindness is not simply dumb tranquility but seems to be a choice. It reminds him of Gigi, a bit. He checks his watch and it’s too late to call her, besides he’s far too drunk. He can hear Fitz, his perpetual houseguest, knocking around, playing Lego Harry Potter on the game console in the main room, but he’s feeling far too morose to be in company with Fitz. He watches Jane dramatize; he watches Jane cry. He pours some more vodka.

He makes his way back into the study, lies on his back under his desk, and moves further through the videos, dizzy and drunk and depressed. Though Lizzie does a surprisingly accurate impression of his aunt, that particular amusement doesn’t dampen the dread he feels seeing the number of videos dwindle in Lizzie’s playlist, nor does seeing how happy and alight she is again with Charlotte. He feel physically sore and bruised, like he’s literally sustained all of Lizzie’s verbal jabs and blows to his body. His arm falls asleep as he’s holding the phone aloft, and he’s switching hands when Fitz, video day player, makes an off-hand remark about Will’s undying loyalty that confirms every suspicion Lizzie’s ever had about Will. And he watches the light in her face be extinguished in seconds. He loves Fitz—he really does love Fitz—but he also violently hates Fitz for about thirty seconds. Because even though he’d never stopped to wonder if he stood a chance with Lizzie Bennet, Will knows this is when he lost it for good. 

It’s not Fitz’s fault—obviously it’s not Fitz’s fault, Will’s not that drunk, and it’s not more than Will admitted to Lizzie himself. Which he thinks he would have done anyway, even if she hadn’t already known. Until he’d seen Jane’s tears—Jane’s actual sobs—he’d believed he’d been in the right. He didn’t hesitate to tell Lizzie that to her face. How many times has he seen Bing’s despondent puppy face in the last month and reminded himself that what he did he only did out of genuine concern for his friend? If nothing else in his life, Will’s always believed in the his ability to make rational decisions, to trust his own logic, to do what’s best for the people he loves after a careful weighing of all the variables. If he’s misread Jane Bennet, that’s his own fault. 

For the penultimate video, Will thinks maybe he’d be better off with one more shot and his feet slung over the couch, but he forgets he’s under the desk and bangs his forehead but good. Still smarting, seeing spots in his vision, he forgoes the last drink which he clearly does not need, and arranges himself carefully on the sofa so that he won’t fall. Lizzie’s eyes—the vitriol in her voice. He believes her when she says she would strangle him to death; he’d believe her if she said she’d strangle him to death, personally revive him, and then repeat the whole process a few more times just for the sake of thoroughness and justice. 

“If I never see that slimy unfeeling sociopathic robot again it’ll be too soon.”

He can’t watch himself on tape. He knows for some people it’s an affectation— _I hate the way my voice sounds on camera!—_ but he thinks he’ll throw up a few more times if he has to watch himself humiliated and rejected by Lizzie Bennet. The experience is still too raw. He thinks it will never heal over enough for him to watch it. To relive the near blinding fury in her expression, the stinging acid of her tone. That he remembers well enough. It’s been sitting there in the back of his mind, moldering all night as he watches video after video of his own bumbling and mistakes and rudeness and short-sightedness. 

“Why don’t you watch my videos?” she’d said. And this is what she really thinks of him. So lofty in his own mind, so far above anyone else, so cut off from human emotion as to ruin people without compunction.

He rolls off the couch and makes for his desk. There’s stationary in the third drawer, a good pen on the blotter. Some things he can tell her with a clear conscious. Others he might apologize for. He’s struggled to connect before, to have a real conversation, and in these last months especially he’s done so with Lizzie. But there’s one way he knows of to tell her the truth without interruption. 

“Dear Lizzie,  
You needn’t worry that this letter is an attempt to restate the feelings I disclosed yesterday, those which you so resoundingly rejected. I would rather we both forget what was said on my part for the sake of future professional interactions and our shared acquaintances. However, I would ask that you read the enclosed, however unpleasant the task may be. I know you will allow me some measure of explanation where explanation can be given.”

At length, he puts down his pen. The envelope’s lost its adhesive, through dampness or age or something equally annoying, but he finds in one of the drawers a wax sealing kit Gigi put in his Christmas stocking several years ago. He sneaks into Fitz’s room, careful and quiet on the tips of his toes like a kid, filches the lighter he finds on the dresser, and returns to his study to seal the letter closed. He turns the package over and over in his hands a few moments, thinking. He’d not stopped to reread or revise. He’s pretty sure he can write soberly even when he’s up to his eyeballs in vodka sweat, and either way, what’s done is done. He stumbles back to the couch and lies down, his hands folded over his stomach.

 _I hate feelings,_ he thinks. _I’m dying for real. I’m never going to sleep again._

And in the morning, he’ll hand her the letter.


End file.
